Synaesthesia Reading

Visual Music : Synaesthesia in art and music since 1900

Themes & Hudson

Organised by Brougher K, Strick, J, Wiseman, A and Zilczer, J

Essay by Mattis, O

Washington DC and Los Angeles

P 18 ‘Music, musical instruments, and musical notation have proven durable subjects for artists from Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse to Jannis Kounellis, Jean-Micahel Basquiat, and Christian Marclay.’

‘These more-or-less literal depictions do not rely on the poetics of synaesthesia. Few artists were more engaged with musical ideas than Piet Mondrian. Taking an entirely different approach to the relationship between art and music, Mondrian engaged with the compositional structures of jazz and bebop rather than with the affective power of colour’

‘Similarly, the aleatory ideas of John Cage proved enormously influential for visual artists in the second half of the twentieth century, but those ideas bore little relation to the tradition of synaesthesia’

p19 ‘Music is, of course, a time-based medium. Musical compositions unfold through time: even the character of a single not is partly defined by duration.’

‘The painter still has little or no control over the sequence or order in which the viewer’s observations are made’

‘A further step in uniting visual and auditory experience has been developed in recent years through the medium of instillation art’

p20 ‘In digital media, by contrast, music and visual art truly are united, not only by experiencing subject, the listener/viewer, but by the artist. They are created out of the same stuff, bits of electronic information, infinitely interchangable’

p25 ‘The musical analogy – the premise that painting should emulate music’

“as music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight” James Whistler 1878

p31 “Kandinsky and Oscar Kokoschka paint pictures in which external object is hardly more to them than a stimulus to improvise color and form and to express themselves as only the composer expressed himself previously” Schoenberg 1912

p32 ‘Kandinsky devised a three-stage system of pictoral composition that would result in an abstract or “nonobjective” art comparable to music.

Impressions – the first pictoral category – represented the artist’s immediate visual sensation of external reality.

Building upon that initial “snapshot”, the painter converted first impressions into Improvisations by giving vent to an inner need or as Kandinsky called it “inner necessity”.

In the third stage of pictoral development, the artist produced still more imaginative Compositions in which creativity and free expression achieve full rein.’

P34 ‘ “Sound” he wrote “is the soul of form… Form is the outer expression of the inner content”’ Kandinsky

P41 “listening to a musical work evokes different images in everyone, an accompaniment that each draws from his own visual memory. That is, chromatism in music and musicality of colours has validity only as metaphor’ 1923 Kupka

P46 “coloured rhythm is not an illustration or an interpretation of a musical work. It is an independent art, although based on the same psychological principles as music… It is the mode of succession of the elements in time, which establishes the analogy with music” 1914 Leopold Sturzwage

Synchromy

P59 Georgia Okeffe  “her Specials” ‘the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye’ 1976

P62 Arthur Dove “Anybody should be able to feel a certain state and express it in terms of paint of music” 1923

P71 A colour scale on the keyboard in The Art of Mobile Colour

P77 “I have been striving to create an atmosphere around each movement, and not by any means follow to the music measure for measure” Thomas Wilfred 1926

Len Lye ‘Colour Box’ 1935 and Hy Hirsch ‘Eneri’ 1953

Jordan Belson ‘Samadhi’ moving image

The Joshua Light Show with Janis Jopelin 1969 and Frank Zappa 1967

P181 ‘give the illusion that the canvas develops like music, in time, while both the old and modern paintings exist strictly in space’ Russel and Macdonald-Wright

P203 ‘The effect of music and color in combination is hypnotic’